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I’m not at VMworld US this year, but I had the opportunity to be briefed by Sam Grocott (Dell EMC Cloud Strategy) on some of Dell EMC‘s key announcements during the event, and thought I’d share some of my rough notes and links here. You can read the press release here.

TL;DR?

It is a multi-cloud world. Multi-cloud requires workload mobility. The market requires a consistent experience between on-premises and off-premises. Dell EMC are doing some more stuff around that.

Cloud Platforms

Dell EMC offer a number of engineered systems to run both IaaS and cloud native applications.

VxRail

Starting with vSphere 6.7, Dell EMC are saying they’re delivering “near” synchronous software releases between VMware and VxRail. In this case that translates to a less than 30 Day delta between releases. There’s also support for:

As would be expected from a company with a large portfolio of products, there’s quite a bit happening on the product enhancement front. Dell EMC are starting to get that they need to be on-board with those pesky cloud types, and they’re also doing a decent job of ensuring their private cloud customers have something to play with as well.

I’m always a little surprised by vendors offering “Cloud Editions” of key products, as it feels a lot like they’re bolting on something to the public cloud when the focus could perhaps be on helping customers get to a cloud-native position sooner. That said, there are good economic reasons to take this approach. By that I mean that there’s always going to be someone who thinks they can just lift and shift their workload to the public cloud, rather than re-factoring their applications. Dell EMC are providing a number of ways to make this a fairly safe undertaking, and products like Unity Cloud Edition provide some nice features such as increased resilience that would be otherwise lacking if the enterprise customer simply dumped its VMs in AWS as-is. I still have hope that we’ll stop doing this as an industry in the near future and embrace some smarter ways of working. But while enterprises are happy enough to spend their money on doing things like they always have, I can’t criticise Dell EMC for wanting a piece of the pie.

Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US. My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

A quick post to provide some closing thoughts on VMworld 2017 and link to the posts I did during the event. Not in that order. I’ll add to this as I come across interesting posts from other people too.

This was my third VMworld US event, and I had a lot of fun. I’d like to thank all the people who helped me out with getting there, the people who stopped and chatted to me at the event, and VMware for putting on a great show. I’m looking forward to (hopefully) getting along to it next year (August 26 – 30).

Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US. My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

You can view the video of Kingston‘s presentation at Tech Field Day Extra VMworld US 2017 here, and download a PDF copy of my rough notes from here.

It’s A Protocol, Not Media

NVMe has been around for a few years now, and some people get it confused for a new kind of media that they plug into their servers. But it’s not really, it’s just a standard specification for accessing Flash media via the PCI Express bus. There’re a bunch of reasons why you might choose to use NVMe instead of SAS, including lower latency and less CPU overhead. My favourite thing about it though is the plethora of form factors available to use. Kingston touched on these in their presentation at Tech Field Day Extra recently. You can get them in half-height, half-length (HHHL) add-in cards (AIC), U.2 (2.5″) and M.2 sizes. To give you an idea of the use cases for each of these, Kingston suggested the following applications:

HHHL (AIC) card

Server / DC applications

High-end workstations

U.2 (2.5″)

Direct-attached, server backplane, just a bunch of flash (JBOF)

White box and OEM-branded

M.2

Client applications

Notebooks, desktops, workstations

Specialised systems

It’s Pretty Fast

NVMe has proven to be pretty fast, and a number of companies are starting to develop products that leverage the protocol in an extremely efficient manner. Coupled with the rise of NVMe/F solutions and you’ve got some pretty cool stuff coming to market. The price is also becoming a lot more reasonable, with Kingston telling us that their DCP1000 NVMe HHHL comes in at around “$0.85 – $0.90 per GB at the moment”. It’s obviously not as cheap as things that spin at 7200RPM but the speed is mighty fine. Kingston also noted that the 2.5″ form factor would be hanging around for some time yet, as customers appreciated the serviceability of the form factor.

Flash media has been slowly but surely taking over the world for a little while now. The cost per GB is reducing (slowly, but surely), and the range of form factors means there’s something for everyone’s needs. Protocol advancements such as NVMe make things even easier, particularly at the high end of town. It’s also been interesting to see these “high end” solutions trickle down to affordable form factors such as PCIe add-in cards. With the relative ubiquity of operating system driver support, NVMe has become super accessible. The interesting thing to watch now is how we effectively leverage these advancements in protocol technologies. Will we use them to make interesting advances in platforms and data access? Or will we keep using the same software architectures we fell in love with 15 years ago (albeit with dramatically improved performance specifications)?

Conclusion and Further Reading

I’ll admit it took me a little while to come up with something to write about after the Kingston presentation. Not because I don’t like them or didn’t find their content interesting. Rather, I felt like I was heading down the path of delivering another corporate backgrounder coupled with speeds and feeds and I know they have better qualified people to deliver that messaging to you (if that’s what you’re into). Kingston do a whole range of memory-related products across a variety of focus areas. That’s all well and good but you probably already knew that. Instead, I thought I could focus a little on the magic behind the magic. The Flash era of storage has been absolutely fascinating to witness, and I think it’s only going to get more interesting over the next few years. If you’re into this kind of thing but need a more comprehensive primer on NVMe, I recommend you check out J Metz’s article on the Cisco blog. It’s a cracking yarn and enlightening to boot. Data Centre Journal also provide a thorough overview here.

Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US. My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

You can view the video of Druva‘s presentation here, and you can download a PDF copy of my rough notes from here.

DMaaS

Druva have been around for a while, and I recently had the opportunity to hear from them at a Tech Field Day Extra event. They have combined their Phoenix and inSync products into a single platform, yielding Druva Cloud Platform. This is being positioned as a “Data Management-as-a-Service” offering.

According to Druva, the solution takes into account all the good stuff, such as:

Protection;

Governance; and

Intelligence.

It works with both:

Local data sources (end points, branch offices, and DCs); and

Cloud data sources (such as IaaS, Cloud Applications, and PaaS).

The Druva cloud is powered by AWS, and provides, amongst other things:

Auto-tiering in the cloud (S3/S3IA/Glacier); and

Easy recovery to any location (servers or the cloud).

Just Because You Can Put A Cat …

With everything there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. Sometimes you might do something and think that you’re doing it right, but you’re not. Wesley Snipes’s line in White Men Can’t Jump may not be appropriate for this post, but Druva came up with one that is: “A VCR in the cloud doesn’t give you Netflix”. When you’re looking at cloud-based data protection solutions, you need to think carefully about just what’s on offer. Druva have worked through a lot of these requirements and claim their solution:

Is fully managed (no need to deploy, manage, support software);

Offers predictable lower costs

Delivers linear and infinite (!) scalability

Provides automatic upgrades and patching; and

Offers seamless data services.

I’m a fan of the idea that cloud services can offer a somewhat predictable cost models to customers. One of the biggest concerns faced by the C-level folk I talk to is the variability of cost when it comes to consuming off-premises services. The platform also offers source side global deduplication, with:

Application-aware block-level deduplication;

Only unique blocks being sent; and

Forever incremental and efficient backups.

The advantage of this approach is that, as Druva charge based on “post-globally deduped storage consumed”, chances are you can keep your costs under control.

It Feels Proper Cloudy

I know a lot of people who are in the midst of the great cloud migration. A lot of them are only now (!) starting to think about how exactly they’re going to protect all of this data in the cloud. Some of them are taking their existing on-premises solutions and adapting them to deal with hybrid or public cloud workloads. Others are dabbling with various services that are primarily cloud-based. Worse still are the ones assuming that the SaaS provider is somehow magically taking care of their data protection needs. Architecting your apps for multiple geos is a step in the right direction towards availability, but you still need to think about data protection in terms of integrity, not just availability. The impression I got from Druva is that they’ve taken some of the best elements of their on-premises and cloud offerings, sprinkled some decent security in the mix, and come up with a solution that could prove remarkably effective.

Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US. My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here are my rough notes from “STO3194BU – Protecting Virtual Machines in VMware Cloud on AWS”, presented by Brian Young and Anita Thomas. You can grab a PDF copy of my notes from here.

Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US. My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

You can view the video of NetApp‘s presentation here, and download a copy of my rough notes from here.

What’s In A Name?

There’s been some amount of debate about whether NetApp’s HCI offering is really HCI or CI. I’m not going to pick sides in this argument. I appreciate that words mean things and definitions are important, but I’d like to focus more on what NetApp’s offering delivers, rather than whether someone in Tech Marketing made the right decision to call this HCI. Let’s just say they’re closer to HCI than WD is to cloud.

Ye Olde Architectures (The HCI Tax)

NetApp spent some time talking about the “HCI Tax” – the overhead of providing various data services with first generation HCI appliances. Gabe touched on the impact of running various iterations of controller VMs, along with the increased memory requirements for services such as deduplication, erasure coding, compression, and encryption. The model for first generation HCI is simple – grow your storage and compute in lockstep as your performance requirements increase. The great thing with this approach is that you can start small and grow your environment as required. The problem with this approach is that you may only need to grow your storage, or you may only need to grow your compute requirement, but not necessarily both. Granted, a number of HCI vendors now offer storage-only nodes to accommodate this requirement, but NetApp don’t think the approach is as polished as it could be. The requirement to add compute as you add storage can also have a financial impact in terms of the money you’ll spend in licensing for CPUs. Whilst one size fits all has its benefits for linear workloads, this approach still has some problems.

The New Style?

NetApp suggest that their solution offers the ability to “scale on your terms”. With this you can

Optimise and protect existing investments;

Scale storage and compute together or independently; and

Eliminate the “HCI Tax”.

Note that only the storage nodes have disks, the compute nodes get blanks. The disks are on the front of the unit and the nodes are stateless. You can’t have different tiers of storage nodes as it’s all one cluster. It’s also BYO switch for connectivity, supporting 10/25Gbps. In terms of scalability, from a storage perspective you can scale as much as SolidFire can nowadays (around 100 nodes), and your compute nodes are limited by vSphere’s maximum configuration.

There are “T-shirt sizes” for implementation, and you can start small with as little as two blocks (2 compute nodes and 4 storage nodes). I don’t believe you mix t-shirt sizes in the same cluster. Makes sense if you think about it for more than a second.

Thoughts

Converged and hyper-converged are different things, and I think this post from Nick Howell (in the context of Cohesity as HCI) sums up the differences nicely. However, what was interesting for me during this presentation wasn’t whether or not this qualifies as HCI or not. Rather, it was about NetApp building on the strengths of SolidFire’s storage offering (guaranteed performance with QoS and good scale) coupled with storage / compute independence to provide customers with a solution that seems to tick a lot of boxes for the discerning punter.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you’ll know that NetApp are quite a different beast to the company first founded 25 years ago. The great thing about them (and the other major vendors) entering the already crowded HCI market is that they offer choices that extend beyond the HCI play. For the next few years at least, there are going to be workloads that just may not go so well with HCI. If you’re already a fan of NetApp, chances are they’ll have an alternative solution that will allow you to leverage their capability and still get the outcome you need. Gabe made the excellent point that “[y]ou can’t go from traditional to cloud overnight, you need to evaluate your apps to see where they fit”. This is exactly the same with HCI. I’m looking forward to see how they go against the more established HCI vendors in the marketplace, and whether the market responds positively to some of the approaches they’ve taken with the solution.

Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US. My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here are my rough notes on “STO3331BUS – Cohesity Hyperconverged Secondary Storage: Simple Data Protection for VMware and vSAN” presented by Gaetan Castelein of Cohesity and Shawn Long, CEO of viLogics. You can grab a PDF of my notes from here.

Secondary Storage Problem

SDS has changed for the better.

Primary storage has improved dramatically

Moving from:

High CapEx costs

Device-centric silos

Complex processes

To:

Policy-based management

Cost-efficient performance

Modern storage architectures

But secondary storage is still problematic

Rapidly growing data

6ZB in 2016

93ZB in 2025

80% unstructured

Too many copies

45% – 60% of capacity for copy data

10 – 12 copies on average

$50B problem

Legacy storage can’t keep up

Doesn’t scale

Fragmented silos

Inefficient

Cohesity Hyperconverged Secondary Storage

You can use this for a number of different applications, including:

File shares

Archiving

Test / Dev

Analytics

Backups

It also offers native integration with the public cloud and Cohesity have been clear that you shouldn’t consider it to be just another backup appliance.

You can use Cohesity with existing backup products if required or you can use Cohesity DataProtect.

Always-Ready Snapshots for Instant Restores

Sub-5 minute RPOs

Fully hydrated images (linked clones)

Catalogue of always-ready images

Instant recoveries (near-zero RTOs)

Integration with Pure Storage

Tight Integration with VMware

vCenter Integration

VADP for snap-based CBT backups

vRA plugin for self-service, policy-based management

CloudArchive

Policy-based archival

Dedupe, compression, encryption

Everything is indexed before it goes to the cloud – search files and VMs

Individual file recovery

Recover to a different Cohesity cluster

CloudReplicate

Replicate backup data to cloud

Deploy Cohesity to the cloud (available on Azure currently, other platforms soon).

Reduce TCO

You can move from “Legacy backup”, where you’re paying maintenance on backup software and deduplication appliances, to paying just for Cohesity.

Testimonial

Shawn Long from viLogics then took the stage to talk about their experiences with Cohesity.

People want to consume IT

“Product’s only as good as the support behind it”

Conclusion

This was a useful session. I do enjoy the sponsored sessions at VMworld. It’s a useful way for the vendors to get their message across in a way that needs to tie back to VMware. There’s often a bit of a sales pitch, but there’s usually also enough information in them to get you looking further into the solution. I’ve been keeping an eye on Cohesity since I first encountered them a few years ago at Storage Field Day, and their story has improved in clarity and coherence since them. If you’re looking at secondary storage solutions it’s worth checking the out. You’ll find some handy resources here. 3.5 stars.

Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US. My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here are my rough notes from “PBO3334BUS – State of the Union: Everything multi-cloud, converged, hyper-converged and more!” presented by Chad Sakac. You can grab a copy of the PDF here.

Confusion

“There’s a lot of confusion inside the marketplace” and people are struggling to see the pattern.

The IT universe is $2.7 trillion and it’s growing at 2% CAGR (growth has slowed to GDP). The spending on on-premises infrastructure is around $1T and this figure is shrinking. The primary movements are towards

SaaS (+60% CAGR); and

Cloud Native, AWS, Azure (+60% CAGR)

On-premises is comprised of:

Servers $100B

Network $100B

Storage $70B

Servers have been negative as a whole in terms of revenue. Funnily enough, blades are cold, and rack mounts are hot – SDS / SDN / SDDC is driving this. From a networking perspective, parts of Cisco are growing (wireless) and declining (switching and routing). Switch hardware is all mainly the same merchant silicon. Storage has been -9% CAGR for the last 12 (?) quarters.

This industry will consolidate. CI is growing a little bit, while HCI is on fire, with the HCI market being worth around $2.5B – $4B today.

The “Easy buttons” are growing but people still want to know “What the hell do I put where?”. If I have a cloud-first strategy – what does that actually mean? It’s also a financial decision – CapEx and OpEx.

CapEx vs OpEx

Where?

Should it be on or off-premises (not managed service, but multi-tenant, public cloud)? You need to consider:

Data gravity (stuff has to live somewhere);

Governance (so many people don’t understand this); and

What you have / don’t have (sometimes, there are constraints on what you can do).

Value

You running it vs Someone else running it. Does the act of doing “it” differentiate you? Remember that there’s no one right answer for this with any given customer.

We have to start from the top of the pyramid, remember that “[c]loud is an operating model, not a place”. It provides you with:

No obligation – Customers experience the benefits of HCI without a long term commitment

Price drops over time – Ensures monthly rate is competitive with decreasing price of technology

Cost advantages over Public Cloud

VDI Workloads – Up to 32% 1st year savings, Up to 62% in 4th year

General purpose virtualized server workloads – Up to 47% 1st year savings, Up to 67% in 5th year

Microsoft SQL Server workloads – Up to 41% 1st year savings, Up to 63% in 5th year

Builders to Buyers

More and more dollars are shifting towards buy, but the majority of the world is still in the traditional “best of breed / I want to build it myself”. Have to keep innovating in the point technologies, such as Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Applications. This is also built in to VMware Cloud on AWS.

At this point Chad was really running out of time, but here are a few other things to check out:

Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US. My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here are my rough notes from “SER1166BU – Housekeeping Strategies for Platform Services Controller-Expert Talk”, presented by Jishnu Surendran Thankamani and Agnes James, both of whom are GSS employees with VMware. You can grab a PDF copy of them here.

Know more about PSC

Infrastructure Services offered by PSC

VMDir – internally developed LDAP service

Single Sign-on (IDMD, STS, SSOAdmin, LookupService)

VMware Certificate Authority

Licensing

Certificates

VMware Endpoint Certificate Manager

Each node has one Machine Endpoint Certificate

Solution User Certificates

machine

vsphere-webclient

vpxd

vpxd-extensions

Right Decisions at the Right Time

Topology Based Best Practices

Embedded PSC

Expected to be simple topology with easy maintenance

Availability management is a matter of protecting a single machine (vCenter HA)

External PSC

Expected to be used with multiple vCenters involved

Availability management based on load balancer options

When more than one PSC is involved replication becomes a point of interest

Maintain same build of PSCs

Use sites to group PSCs in multiple HA groups – PSCs behind a load balancer

Latency between PSCs – as low as possible

Configuration Maximums

Maximum number of PSCs supported in replication – 8 (6.0), 10 (6.5)

Maximum number of PSCs behind load balancer – 4

Maximum vCenters in single SSO domain – 10 (6.0 and 6.5), 15 (6.5 U1)

Group membership per user for best performance – 1015

Factors for Design Decisions

Area

Choices

Justification

Implication

Deployment Topology

Embedded

Reduced Resource utilisation for Management, VCHA availability needed on PSC as well

Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US. My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here are my rough notes from “STO2063BU – Architecting Site Recovery Manager to Meet Your Recovery Goals” presented by GS Khalsa. You can grab a PDF version of them from here. It’s mainly bullet points, but I’m sure you know the drill.

Terminology

RPO – Last viable restore point

RTO – How long it will take before all functionality is recovered

You should break these down to an application, or a service tier level.

You can find more information on Enhanced Linked Mode here. It makes it easier to manage your environment and was introduced in vSphere 6.0.

Impacts to RTO

Decision Time

How long does it take to decide to failover?

IP Customisation

Workflow without customisation

Power on VM and wait for VMtools heartbeats

Workflow with IP customisation

Power on VM with network disconnected

Customise IP utilising VMtools

Power off VM

Power on VM and wait for VMtools heartbeats

Alternatives

Stretched Layer 2

Move VLAN / Subnet

It’s going to take some time to do when you failover a guest

Priorities and Dependencies vs Priorities Only

Organisation for lower RTO

Fewer / larger NFS datastore / LUNs

Fewer protection groups

Don’t replicate VM swap files

Fewer recovery plans

VM Configuration

VMware Tools installed in all VMs

Suspend VMS on Recovery vs PowerOff VMs

Array-based replication vs vSphere Replication

Recovery Site Sizing

vCenter sizing – it works harder than you think

Number of hosts – more is better

Enable DRS – why wouldn’t you?

Different recovery plans target different clusters

Recommendations

Be Clear with the Business

What is / are their

RPOs?

RTOs?

Cost of downtime?

Application priorities?

Units of failover?

Externalities?

Do you have Executive buy-in?

Risk with Infrequent DR Plan Testing

Parallel and cutover tests provide the best verification, but are very resource intensive and time consuming

Cutover tests are disruptive, may take days to complete and leaves the business at risk

Frequent DR Testing Reduces Risk

Increased confidence that the plan will work

Recovery can be tested at anytime without impact to production

Test Network

Use VLAN or isolated network for test environment

Default “auto” setting does not allow VM communication between hosts

Different PortGroup can be specified in SRM for test vs actual run

Specified in Network Mapping and / or Recovery Plan

Test Network – Multiple Options

Two Options

Disconnect NSX Uplink (this can be easily scripted)

Use NSX to create duplicate “Test” networks

RTO = dollars

*Demos

Conclusion and Further Reading

I enjoy these kind of sessions, as they provide a nice overview of the product capabilities that ties in well with business requirements. SRM is a pretty neat solution, and something you might consider using if you need to move workload from one DC to another. If you’re after a technical overview of Site Recovery Manager 6.5, this site is pretty good too. 4.5 stars.

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disclaimer

The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by my employer and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of my employers, previous or current. This is my blog.

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